Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 2.djvu/508

 ment of the notion in time part of its ultimate formula, we require a time which is not merely limited in the sense of being cut off from other time, but in the sense of having none before and none after it. Of this we have no more experience than we have of infinite time, and if there are difficulties in the way of both we have no right to prefer the one to the other.

Since either hypothesis as to the extension of time leads us into equal difficulties, our course should surely be not to accept either, but to reject both. Time must be either finite or infinite, we are told. But there is a third alternative. There may be something wrong in our conception of time, or rather, to speak more precisely, there may be something which renders it unfit, in metaphysics, for the ultimate explanation of the universe, however suited it may be to the finite thought of every-day life. If we ask whether time, as a fact, is finite or infinite, we find hopeless difficulties in the way of either answer. Yet if we take time as an ultimate reality, there seems no other alternative. Our only resource is to conclude that time is not an ultimate reality.

This is the same principle which is at work in the dialectic itself. When we find that any category, if we analyse it sufficiently, lands us, in its application to reality, in contradictions, we do not accept one contradictory proposition and reject the other. We conclude the category in question to be an inadequate way of looking at reality, and we try to find a higher conception, which will embrace all the truth of the lower one, while it will avoid the contradictions. This is what we ought, it would seem, to do with the idea of time. If it only presents us with a choice between impossibilities, we must regard it as an inadequate way of looking at the universe. And in this case we cannot accept the development of the dialectic in time as part of our ultimate solution. Beside these difficulties, which would equally perplex any idealistic system which adopted a time process as an original element, there is another which belongs specially to the dialectic. It appears to be essential to the possibility of a dialectic that the highest term in which the process ends shall be taken as the presupposition of all the lower terms. The passage from category to category must not be taken as an actual advance, producing that which did not previously exist, but as an advance from an abstraction to the concrete whole from which the abstraction was made — demonstrating and rendering explicit what was before only implicit and immediately given, but still only reconstructing and not constructing anything fresh.